NHS Trusts’ enhanced efficiency achieves 5:1 ROI in 18 months

3 Minute Read

Statistics shows that everything is normal

The Challenge

A major Midlands NHS Trust needed to transform its culture to enable more effective ways of working, to deliver the highest quality of patient care. 

It was important that the trust not only made improvements, but also sustained them and introduced a culture of continuous improvement.

Unipart Consultancy was tasked with the following objectives:

  • Facilitate improvements in patient experience through enhanced quality, safety, and access to care
  • Generate organisation-wide engagement to both communicate and shape the programme’s delivery
  • Develop service transformation capability within senior operational and clinical teams, as well as within the Trust’s Internal Transformation Team
  • Optimise the efficiency, productivity and utilisation of resources in order to achieve long-term financial sustainability.

The Solution

High-level scoping activity and peer-to-peer benchmarking was undertaken to identify improvement opportunities. Practical opportunities for improved patient experience, cost reductions, and increased revenues were identified within the wards, pharmacy, catheter laboratories, procurement processes, and clinical specialties.

Working in collaboration with the Executive Team, Unipart Consultancy’s delivery team facilitated a range of engagement sessions with clinicians, actively involving them in scoping, designing, and delivering the programme.

Gaining clinical buy-in to solutions is critical to ensuring their longevity, so clinicians were engaged throughout and were fully invested into solutions that they owned themselves.

Trust Leadership and Transformation Teams were engaged in developing a standard methodology to be deployed in order to build internal capability and engage staff at all levels in improving performance and patient experience. The systematic application of these tools and standards was further enhanced by the ability to ‘go see’ their application at a mature local Unipart facility.

5:1 ROI

In 18 months

The Impact

The overall transformation programme delivered a return on investment of 5:1 during the 18-month duration, with a target ROI of 12:1 over a 3-year period. The full benefits include:

  • £2m additional revenues as a result of improvement coding processes (£750k non-elective and £1.3m elective)
  • £1.3m per annum recurrent procurement savings
  • Renegotiations with 107 suppliers, with 76 of those offering cost savings, resulting in total saving of approximately £1m per annum
  • £210k savings per annum as a result of pharmacy improvements to reduce waste through the use of inpatient supplies for “To Take Out”
  • 25% increase in cath lab procedures, facilitating faster results and shortening of patient pathways
  • Significant inpatient length of stay reductions
  • Knowledge transfer to staff within ward staff, pharmacy, and the Trust’s Transformation Team, to improve employee ownership, embed existing improvements, and support future continuous improvement.
Statistics shows that everything is normal

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